Jelly cakes don’t really sound very appetizing, or particularly impressive for that matter, but that’s only because you’ve probably never seen one of Siew Heng Boon’s amazing 3D jelly cakes.

Intricately-designed 3D jelly cakes are really popular in South-East Asian countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, and in Mexico, but some of the world’s most amazing such edible masterpieces are actually created by an Australian artist from Sidney. Siew Heng Boon has been making 3D jelly cakes for only two years now, but she’s already considered a master of the trade, and her incredible creations often have people do a double take.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

A Chinese art student sparked a heated debate online after using the wings of over 500 butterflies to create a series of artworks symbolizing rebirth. While some consider her “sick” for using butterfly wings as an art medium, others think her creations qualify as original art.

Li Zheng, a fourth-year art student at Quanzhou Normal University in Fujian province, China, created a series of artworks consisting of meticulously arranged butterfly wings as part of her graduation piece. She and her colleagues were instructed by their lecturer to recreate famous artworks using different materials. Li decided she wanted to recreate some of the masterpieces of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, but at first, she had no idea what materials she was going to use.

When it comes to metallic wire artworks, you’ll have a tough time finding a more talented artist than @tdaiki1216, a young Japanese art graduate who seems able to twist copper and brass wire into pretty much anything he sets his mind to, from sculptures that look like drawn manga, to slithering snakes and giant insects.

@tdaiki1216, whose real name is Tsutamoto Dawiki, first made headlines in Japan two years ago, when his incredibly detailed wire sculptures imitating manga drawings went viral on Twitter. Fixed into square wooden blocks and placed against a white background, his artworks looked exactly like manga comics, even though they were actually twisted pieces of wire. Those were impressive enough, but @tdaiki1216 has stepped up his game even more over these last few years, and is now specializing in more complex wire sculptures, some of which are simply mind-blowing.

From afar, Phil Vance’s typography portraits look like expertly drawn artworks, but as you draw nearer to them, you start to see that every feature is actually made up of handwritten text. Once you start deciphering all the words, you realize they are famous quotes of the subject written over and over again. The talented artist describes his art as “cross-hatching but with words.”

Monika Falčik, a 22-year-old makeup junky from Lithuania, has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately for her impressive optical illusions, using face paint and makeup to make her face look warped, sliced or detached from her head.

Falčik has been getting some attention on Instagram for a while now, by posting mainly makeup and travel related photos, but her number of followers skyrocketed once she started posting facial optical illusions, late last year. It all started on Halloween, when Monika decided to use some of the tricks she had learned watching makeup and special effects tutorials on YouTube to give herself a creepy look for the holiday. She got huge feedback from her Instagram followers, and she’s been treating them to various optical illusions ever since.

From stain remover to mouthwash replacement, saltwater has many uses in our everyday lives, and thanks to Japanese self-taught artist Mai Hirashima, we can also add ‘art medium’ to the list as well.

Mai Hirashima uses saltwater as paint, carefully applying it on black paper canvases, using small brushes and thin bamboo skewers, and then applying heat to cause the water to evaporate and the salt crystallize in the desired shape. It’s a laborious and time-consuming process, but the results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

When it comes to steampunk-inspired wristwatches, I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen anything quite like the ones Japanese designer FRISK_P makes. To say her creations are steampunk masterpieces almost feels like an understatement, and once you see her work in action, I’m pretty sure you’ll agree.

FRISK_P’s mission is “to make wristwatches that nobody else makes”. They are definitely not the most practical wristwatches, nor the most compact ones, but in terms of uniqueness and wow-factor, they are on a whole other level.

Kiev-based artist Olga Kamenetskaya is very popular among doll collectors for her ability to turn generic dolls of all shapes and sizes into unique works of art, some of them so-realistic looking you could swear they were real people.

Like most girls, Olga used to love playing with dolls as a child. She eventually grew out of it, only to rediscover her fascination with them a few years ago, after seeing a commercial for Monster High Dolls. She bought one, but then she wanted another one, and another one. She was so enthralled with Monster High Dolls that she spent a lot of time looking at photos of the different dolls online. One day, Olga spotted one that she had never seen before, and after doing some research, she learned that it was an OOAK (One Of A Kind). She found it incredible that someone could create that level of detail on a doll completely by hand, and she spent a whole year researching and watching tutorials online before taking up a brush and trying it herself.

We’ve seen artists use all sorts of canvases in the past, from paper towels, to butterfly wings or fallen leaves, but never their own carpets. Well, thank to the genius of Japanese Twitter user @agito0219, we can now add carpets to the list of unusual things to create exceptional art on.

@agito0219’s art is as simple as it is impressive. If you’ve ever vacuumed a carpet, you probably already know they usually have two sides. Brush the fibers one way and you reveal one side, but brush them again against the grain and you can see patterns of a slightly or completely different color, depending on the rug. It’s this double-sided nature of her carpets that the mysterious @agito0219 exploits to create her intricate yet ephemeral works of art.

Latvian performance artist Arturs Bērziņš has managed to spark a heated debate about the ethics of his latest project, where he sliced bits of flesh from two people’s bodies, cooked them in a frying pan and fed it back to them.

Bērziņš’ controversial performance, named Eschatology, was staged on March 6th, at the Museum LV un Grata JJ, in Riga. As promised, those in attendance were treated to something they had most likely never seen before. The artist, wearing a white forensic suit, practiced his surgical skills on two models – a man and a woman – slicing bits of flesh from their backs, then frying them in a hot pan and feeding the meat back to them.

Zayd Menk, a very patient artist from Zimbabwe, spent three months building a 0.0635:100 scale model of Midtown Manhattan out of discarded computer components.

The 17-year-old artist, who made the model for a school project, used 263 sticks of hot glue, 27 motherboards, 11 CPUs, 10 CRT monitor motherboards, 18 sticks of RAM, 15 batteries, 12 Nokia E-series phones, 7 power supplies, 4 watches, 4 audio cards, 3 hard drives, 2 telephones and various other electronic components to create mathematically sound versions of Manhattan skyscrapers and buildings. To do this he spent much of his time collecting data from sites like Google Maps, Wikipedia and Reddit, and then making calculations to ensure that all miniatures were to scale.

These lovely portraits may look like high-definition artistic photographs, or even the product of CGI, but they are actually oil paintings created by Japanese artist Yasutomo Oka

At just 34-years-old, Yasutomo Oka is quite obviously already a master when it comes to hyperrealistic paintings. The artist, who hails from Komaki, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, spends up to a month working on one of these masterpieces, making sure that they turn out as realistic as possible, and the result is almost always awe-inspiring.

Whether you’re a passionate furry or just someone who appreciates cool headgear, you’re most likely going to love the incredibly realistic wearable heads made by Japanese modeler Kamonohashizokei (Platypus Modeling).

Looking at theses animal heads for the first time, you’re tempted to think they’re just that, creepy taxidermied heads, but in fact they are all synthetic hand-made renditions created by one of Japan’s most talented modelers. And the best part is that you can wear them on your head to freak people out.

Two years ago, English artist Carl Lavia set out to create a large-scale sketch of Birmingham, one of the largest cities in the UK, using photos he took himself while walking around the city, as well as aerial footage from books and google maps to help him piece the whole thing together. The result of his work was so impressive that Lavia decided to dedicate years of his life to sketching out all 69 cities in the United Kingdom, in great detail.

44-year-old Carl Lavia started drawing when he was just 5, and has been doing it ever since. After spending most of his childhood drawing imaginary cities, the self-taught sketch-artist fulfilled his dream of sketching the impressive cities of his homeland. With the help of his project partner, Lorna Le Bredonchel, Carl spends weeks walking around the cities he plans on reproducing, to get a feel of the atmosphere that makes them unique, but also stopping to take photos and do sketches of sections he finds particularly interesting. He then uses these bits of information, as well as aerial imagery to create large-scale sketches of each city. The whole process, from research stage to the completed sketch can take several months.